Fecking hoarding by proxy. Anyone else have relatives who do this?

[TheQueenOfWands]

My mum just found an old, filthy, partially deflated football near my house.

It's now in my garden. The same garden which I've recently spent great time and expense tidying up and decorating.

Why? Well, I'll tell you why. Apparently a child will be 'overjoyed' to receive it once it's been cleaned up and reinflated. Also, there's too much stuff in landfill so it's obviously not on to simply throw it out.

Today is my only day off from work. I worked 72 hours last week and 50 this week. I have no interest in laundering footballs and don't have a clue how I'd reinflate it. I also don't know any children, let alone any who would be overjoyed to receive a vaguely scrubbed, badly inflated foot ball.

This isn't the first time she's done this. My parents do this quite a lot.

It's such a shame to throw something out so obviously I have to make use of it or DS would be thrilled with it.

Aaargh!!

Doesn't help that I've recently been decluttering (much love to Marie Kondo) and am happy doing so.

They know this. Yet are still determine to fill my house with crap or visibly recoil when they see me give/throw something away.

Any sign of hoarding difficulties in your mum's house?

You can either firmly but politely refuse to take the items she gives you, or take them and discard them. Discarding them for her is probably the best option, because if she is having difficulties at home leaving her with the items is probably not helpful.

So you've binned it - haven't you??

@SeamstressfromTreacleMineRoad Sat 07-Apr-18 12:11:31
Bought up in the war I think has a lot to do with it

How old are you and your parents..? confused I'm 70 later this year - and I was born years after the war had finished..!

My parents were born in 1924 and definitely had this hoarding/ Proxy issue.

Yes, I blame the war. They had nothing and wasted nothing

My mum would do this if I let her :/ I did have to loose my shit with her at one point and she did take it in luckily!

If people don’t listen then just throw junk straight in the bin and keep a bag or box somewhere handy to keep charity shop stuff together to drop off once a month or something. The second one is good practice anyhow for keeping on top of getting rid of your own stuff you no longer need.

my dad and his garage.....

I knew he thought I was a bossy cow, so i just thought - I may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, and ditched 90% of it. He grumbled and cursed. But 2 weeks later was laughing about how his daughter had sorted out all the mess and chucked away years of rubbish and how great it was.....

Next visit I intend to tackle the 10% remaining.

I just wait until they are gone then bin it.

I love my parents dearly but their inability to chuck stuff out serves as a constant warning to me not to EVER EVER get like that. The worse their house gets, the more minimalist mine gets.

The worst thing is, when I suggest to my mum that she needs a clear out (I am the queen of understatement), she just a) blames it all on my father and then b) reassures me that after they are dead I can hire a skip and get rid of it all. She says this like she is generously doing me a huge favour.

My step-mother was always giving me all sorts of old crap. To avoid conflict I would say thank you very much with a smile and throw it away after she'd left.

my parents are wartime children, they live with a lot more 'stuff' than I do but they don't pass on rubbish and have full understanding of the use of a bin and recycling.

this isn't 'war baby' this is either stupidity or idiocy.

My mum does this. She gave me a guilt complex for years about 'throwing away' perfectly good clothes (charity shop/recycling). I couldn't get rid because of the money I spent or because they were still in perfect condition.

I still have hoarding tendencies now that I am trying to get over. It is so mentally freeing to just get rid of stuff.

and my mother gave me nearly 200xCDs of religious music. And music books. And music scores.

Im tone deaf, not religious, and cannot play an instrument.

I have a toolkit.

I trash everything I don't need and seperate it into their component parts for recycling.

It's very therapeutic.

specialsubject or it could be a mental health problem. Hard to make even an educated guess from the information given.

My FIL does this....he picks up things off the road and brings them to me. He loves it...and so do I! I am also a hoarder and love old shite.

He sees one old chair and grabs it "Ah! Aja will love this!" MIL is about it but I receive the old tat happily.

My MIL used to do this. Her source was car boot sales. She once bought my son a second hand pair of pants at one, which was grim. She also used to try and offload all her unwanted old stuff on us. Sometimes she'd give me things I didn't want then ask for them back a few months down the line when I'd binned them. I soon learned to just say no to everything, which deflated her terribly.

She was the kind of person who likes to feel superior to others so I think it was all mind games serving to make her feel beneficient as well as making her feel superior because she would have had, to her mind, better stuff than us. If we bought something new she always wanted to know how much we had paid and then pointed out that we could have got it cheaper on the market or somewhere, trying to take the shine off. I remember once she acted all affronted that I had paid ten pounds for voile panels for my living room window when I could have got a net curtain on the market for about four pounds. Then she went and got herself a pair of custom made curtains for her front window that cost her about two hundred pounds.

I just see this as a kindness I do my parents they can’t throw anything away even small scraps of leftover food get foisted on me! I just bin everything and tell them I ate it used it or passed it on. They rarely ask to be fair - I think they are just hugely relieved to be free of the anxiety! What a brilliant way to look at it, I suffered the MIL who dumped stuff on me and am married to a hoarder so I well know the frustrations, your method just seems to remove alot of the stress although it won't work with my husband but it would have with his mum.

DarkDarkNight I know it's a bit of a cliche at this stage but you could really benefit from the Kondo book if you haven't already read it. It really does deal with that issue of giving yourself permission to get rid of things when you've always had the mindset that you can't because it's still useable or it cost whatever. I particularly found that part very freeing.

My mother does this, it drives me insane.
She’s an actual hoarder though, her house is disgusting as she fills it with pets and stuff. Old jewellery and just crap.
She buys everything in bulk and then loses it in her house and buys more.
I’m strict with her but she’ll do it anyway, I had a sleepover at my house and she collected all the half drank bottles of lucozade and tried to give them to my sister, I told her that my sister would not want 10 random children’s half drunk lucozade and put them in the bin, she took them out the bin and gave them to my sister.
She’s poorly but it’s also a form of control, it’s like she’s marking her territory by making your space her space.
She’s also shit at presents, one year she got me a half full tin of Japanese spice mix for my birthday and my grandma asked her to get me a box of nice chocolates as she couldn’t get to the shop and she went to Costco and bought me the biggest box of fizzy space thingys (the ones with the sherbert inside) that you’ve ever seen. I never ever ever eat sweets like that, but she couldn’t bring herself to just get me a nice box of chocolates like my grandma had asked.

She’s very controlling.

TheVastMajority are you available for hire? I hate all the clutter and I know that ultimately my husband is overwhelmed by it. If I think of him dying, he is ten years old than me and in bad health so likely to be him first but of course I might just go under a bus, I can only think of having to clear it all up. I know it is awful and I should be sad at the thought of him being gone, the end of a long marriage etc but I can't see past the clutter.

FIL in particular does this. One New Year's Day we went for a walk and he wanted to collect the pub glasses that had been left on the river pathway by the revellers from the night before and take them home for us. When DH and I got together we donated crockery etc to the charity shop as we each had a set and didn't need double so MIL noticed and brought us more to replace what we had got rid of. They are also the sort of people that take the sugar packets and spare serviettes home with them when they have a meal out.

She buys everything in bulk and then loses it in her house and buys more. Oh I recognise this and next time they buy more so it won't get lost and even if they don't lose it they forget they already have 12 whatevers so they go to buy one and then buy 3 because you never know when you will need another.

She keeps lizards and has decided it’s cheaper to breed the locusts for it herself and now has a LOCUST FARM in her living ro under all her shit.

She’s not poor.

My MIL is a bit like this... she holds onto DH and sibling's stuff our kids (and BIL's) and while it's all lovely stuff it was a real pain when we lived with 2 kids in a 2 bed flat and they kept pressing it on us, and also she would offer to buy presents for kids we had no room for and not take no for an answer. A typical scenario when being offered an overly-large thing (new or old) would be for her to ask if we want it, me to say 'It's lovely of you, but I'm not sure we have the space' (trying to be polite). Then she'd ask again and I'd be like that again, then the next time I'd say outright 'Thank you but no, we don't have the space.'

And then it would be 'So, have you made up your mind about the X yet?' and we generally gave up at that point. So I have to say, with some people 'No' isn't enough.

My 'F' used to do this as a form of control over me. When I moved into my first house it had a wonderfully huge, EMPTY shed, which was perfect for my restoration furniture business.

But oh no, he decided his need was more important and very quickly filled it up (when I wasn't there) with his own furniture that was already stored quite happily in his garage !!

After telling him several times I needed it moved, I then told him I'd sell it if it wasn't gone within the week.
It wasn't! So I did! .....then put a whacking great padlock on the door too.

He now doesn't know where I live so my two new sheds are all my own!

Oh, it's going in the bin.

PITA though.

I guess I'm just massively upset that someone sees my much laboured over garden as a public bin.

We spent a great deal of time over it and made three recycling centre trips to get rid of the crap. See is aware of this.